Earlier this year, a couple of game developers let me in on one of their secrets: they intentionally play bad games. They play the stuff you or I would avoid not to learn what to avoid, but to learn what to do and imitate. They told me that good ideas lurk everywhere, and no one else is looking in the bad games.

The game developers who told me their technique do not work for Rockstar Games. As far I know, they’ve had no hand at making Grand Theft Auto games. But if they did, I hope they would play EA’s Godfather II, the most flawed of 2009’s big-publisher open-world games.

Godfather II is a broken, sputtering jalopy of a game. To use a more apt metaphor, it is an open world beset by blight, the digital equivalent of a city where the bridges are crumbling and the water mains are about to burst. It has bland graphics, poor artificial intelligence, awkward story, etc.

And yet, after playing through it and THQ’s new Red Faction, Sony’s inFamous, Activision’s Prototype and Rocsktar’s Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, I believe Godfather II surpasses those more enjoyable 2009 open-world games in a crucial way: You matter in it more. It’s more alive. It knows that you’re in it. And it reacts to you.

Prototype’s New York collapses to its red-sky ruin regardless of your actions. You surf its avalanche, chipping at rocks along the way, but the tumble is brutal and inexorable.

Red Faction’s Martian colony towers do fall from your sledgehammer swings, but the swelling revolution that brings its citizens to take up arms against the police authority feels no more the product of your actions than a river’s current feels determined by how you swipe your hand through the water.

In Grand Theft Auto IV, Liberty City stands unaffected by your mayhem, your impact noted only by new hysteria chattered on its radio stations. Like a good New Yorker, Rockstar’s fake New York barely bats an eye at what you’re doing in it.

The Empire City of inFamous bears more of your mark. The game comes closest to what Godfather II achieves, but it is still EA’s crime adventure that manages to make its location feel most organic.

The method for the Godfather II’s best success doesn’t sound sexy. What happens in the New York, Florida and Cuba of the game is a property-control simulation. It’s a dull-on-paper conquest of gambling dens, auto chop shops and whorehouses, committed sometimes at the hands-dirty ground level of the GTA games it apes. You, a mafia don, walk into a warehouse where a rival mob family runs guns and kill every rival mafioso who shoots at you before shaking down the warehouse’s boss, extorting him, adding him to your income ledger and watching his property turning your colour on the game’s map. Other times, conquest occurs from the map’s god view or, more likely, in the background, as the orders you delivered to the men in your mob family are executed off-screen. While you drive to one location for another mission that could have been in GTA III, you’re notified that your capo took over a nightclub or that your foot soldiers stormed a waterfront factory. You told them to.

The prize accomplishment of Godfather II is that the mob families controlled by the game try to do all of that to you. They attack your properties. They try to take them over. They recognise your rising influence and push back. They necessitate that you send your underboss, who would otherwise be fighting at your side as a computer-controlled ally, from your ground-level crew to defend a money-making property. A rival capo you’ve marked for death and planned to throw off a bridge might instead show up storming the brothel you fought hard to take over. He’s going at you on his own time.

The result is a game that registers the grand violence you perpetrate in its open world and retaliates. The results aren’t smooth. At ground level, Godfather II crumbles. Enemies have poor intelligence; allies shoot at walls. Guns dropped by killed mobsters float in the air. The cities are cartoonishly shrunken, the game’s graphics primitive and plain. But what is occurring within that mess and what is occurring off-screen feels like it has breath and life.

This landscape lives. Godfather’s three regions are not prop cities or sets of cardboard walls. This New York is not just a doormat on which you may wipe your feet. It is a place that seems to know that you are in it and does something about it.

I’d rather look at Empire City. I’d prefer to drive through Liberty City or fight on Red Faction’s Mars. I will, nevertheless, still yearn for the next open-world game that I play to react in the way Godfather II did. I want the game’s world to remember the heat and stamp of my actions beyond the conclusion of the given mission I’m playing and to fire back. I want it all to feel alive. And I won’t believe such things can be accomplished only or best in a broken-down Godfather game.

Yes, that’s right, we’re now publishing reader reviews here on Kotaku. This is your chance to deliver sensible game purchasing advice to the rest of the Kotaku community.

And thanks to the very kind chaps at Madman Entertainment, purveyor of all kinds of cool, indie and esoteric film, the best reader review we publish each month will win a prize pack containing ten of the latest Madman DVD releases.

This review was submitted by Matt McLeod. If you’ve played Prototype, or just want to ask Matt more about it, leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Prototype (360, PS3, PC)

Prototype follows the journey of genetically formed shape shifter Alex Mercer as he searches for clues about his past and seeks revenge against those responsible for his creation.

Loved
The Prototype: Whether it’s kicking helicopters out of the sky or using your arm as a sword the game immerses you as an ultimate weapon. Watching my character get smacked by rockets then controlling him to spring back gracefully to hijack a flying vehicle gave me a childish grin few gaming moments can provide.

New York, New York: By far my favourite sandbox setting since GTA4, Radical has done an amazing job of recreating the city. My favourite part to the game was the ability to just spend hours gliding around it. It’s satisfying to be able to jump from a tall skyscraper and rupture the roads in Times Square, flipping passing cars over in the process, without taking damage.

Challenging: It was nice to have a game that was a fair challenge and required some skill to win instead of handing over the wins.

Hated
Storyline: Using the sandbox environment to allow you to search for characters that will help you develop the story is a great idea, however it becomes old when there’s 131 pieces to the puzzle. By the time I’d finished the game I felt like I had more questions than answers still with the information I’d gathered being sketchy at best.

Cardboard Cut-out: Alex had about as much personality as a Keanu Reeves character. Being devoid of emotions stopped me from caring about his “plight”.

Events: No Radical, I don’t want to run obstacle courses of buildings to collect orbs with frustrating time limits for medals.

Overall, Prototype provided a refreshing take on sandbox action and is definitely worth a play through.

Reviewed by: Matthew McLeod

You can have your Reader Review published on Kotaku. Send your review to us at the usual address. Make sure it’s written in the same format as above and in under 300 words – yes, we’ve upped the word limit. We’ll publish the best ones we get and the best of the month will win a Madman DVD prize pack.

(Check out our software and hardware reports for June here… then read this analysis and add yours.)

EA Nails The Wii, Thanks To mums And Dads: EA has two Wii games placed powerfully in the top five best-selling games of June, a feat that I don’t think any third-party publisher has accomplished since the Wii launched. And how did EA do it? Not with a game for teenage boys. Not with a first-person shooter. Not with an M-rated gorefest. But with EA Sports Active, a fitness game targeted at grown women, many of them likely to be mums. And they did it with Tiger Woods PGA 10, the definitive sports game for dads. That’s the Wii audience for EA… all grown up!

Tiger Pulls A Guitar Hero: Also notable about the performance of Tiger Woods on the Wii is that the game charted for the Wii but not for any other platform. While Maddens and Call of Dutys are still series whose PS3/ Xbox360 versions handily outperform the Wii editions, Tiger performed more like a Guitar Hero game. The Guitar Heroes have been selling better on the Wii than on any other platform. That speaks to who has a Wii. It is also a likely a byproduct of the Wii Remote (with MotionPlus) being so well-associated by EA and gamers with the swing of a golf club. What’s the next franchise that will see Wii out in front?

Open Worlds Are Big — But Do People Think Of Them As Open Worlds?: It looked like Prototype, Infamous and Red Faction Guerilla, three open-world games released within weeks of each other, would cannibalize each other’s sales. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t. But none appears to have flopped, as versions of all three made the top 10. People like open-world an consume a lot of them, despite those games being among the longest games out there. Could the allure be that they give so much bang for their buck? Or is their open-worldness something most consumers don’t notice? A genre connection that’s invisible to those buying based on commercials and boxart?

Blasts From Pasts: Among the top 10 posts of June are only five games released in the new 35-day reporting period. That’s the way it works these days: lots of games linger. This month’s lingerers are the consistent strong sellers Mario Kart Wii, Wii Fit along with recent stars Infamous, UFC and EA Sports Active.

Notable new releases that failed to make the overall software top 10 (With no console or handheld version selling under 192,700 units in the U.S. by July 4): Rock Band Unplugged (June 9), Ghostbusters: The Video Game (June 16), Let’s Tap (June 16), Guitar Hero Smash Hits (June 16), Monster Hunter Freedom Unite (PSP), Overlord II (June 23), The Conduit (June 23), Transformers Revenge of The Fallen (June 23), BlazBlue (June 30), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (June 30), Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (June 30)

Nintendo DS – 21,900 units/day (down 725)
Wii – 10,334 units/day (down 5)
Xbox 360 – 6,874 units/day (up 624)
PS3 – 4,706 units/day (up 27)
PSP – 4,671 units/day (down 1,085)
PS2 – 4,363 units/day (up 184)

(Find out more about the Kotaku-patented NPD-PD stat)

The same was true for THQ’s UFC 2009 Undisputed, which topped U.S. game sales in May. The mixed martial arts title moved another 338,300 units on the Xbox 360, KO-ing its competition, EA’s Fight Night Round 4. But give credit to Sucker Punch’s Infamous, though. The PlayStation 3 game’s second month sales were better than its first, giving it a top ten showing.

EA Sports Active managed to outsell Wii Fit in its second month on the U.S. market, a win for the third-party publisher. EA also scored a Wii hit with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, which landed in fourth place. Also debuting strongly in the NPD top ten for June was THQ’s Red Faction: Guerrilla, with the Xbox 360 version selling just shy of 200,000 units.

01. Prototype (X360) – 419,900
02. UFC 2009: Undisputed (X360) – 338,300
03. EA Sports Active (Wii) – 289,100
04. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 (Wii) – 272,400
05. Wii Fit (Wii) – 271,600
06. Fight Night Round 4 (X360) – 260,800
07. Fight Night Round 4 (PS3) – 210,300
08. Mario Kart Wii (Wii) – 202,100
09. Red Faction: Guerrilla (X360) – 199,400
10. Infamous (PS3) – 192,700

Total software sales in the U.S. were $US625.79 million, down from the $US875.75 million in games people bought in June 2008.

NPD analyst Anita Frazier points out what’s interesting, troubling and tout-worthy in June’s game sales.

“Interestingly, this is the first month since its launch at retail 29 months ago that Wii Play has not been featured in the top 10 list for the month,” Frazier notes. “That’s an astonishing record for this industry.”

Here’s the semi-bad news.

“Prototype was the top selling title for the month, realizing roughly 600K units at retail across the two platforms. While this is solid performance for new IP, it’s a relatively modest sales figure for any game capturing the top spot for the month.”

Fahey seemed to like it enough in his Prototype review. And if you happened to like Radical’s Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, you’ll probably like this one too. Reduced to just $US39.98 for the console versions, a mere $US29.98 for the Games For Windows edition, you can’t leave it on the virtual store shelf! Go on, treat yourself. You deserve it.

Thanks to our tipsters for the heads up!

Prototype – Deal of the Day [Amazon]

Astoundingly and to their everlasting credit, both Radical and Sucker Punch participated. First up, Radical sent in two submissions, but that monstrosity takes the cake – Cole McGrath with Vegas showgirl peacock tail, a Marilyn Monroe birthmark and … oh God are his pubes showing? NEXT.

Here’s your winner: Alex Mercer, who shapeshifted up some heaving bosoms thanks to Sucker Punch, in a tableau that “could be the cover of a romance novel.” Per Yahtzee’s award citation:

It’s a close call, but I’m going to declare Sucker Punch the winner by one lovingly-rendered pair of breasts. Also their unicorn is a much prouder, mightier steed, and Alex’s expression is delightfully coquettish. Therefore InFamous must be the better game. Buy InFamous. Prototype’s still good, though. Buy it as well.

Yahtzee’s Prototype vs. Infamous Challenge [The Escapist via Joystiq]

Developed by Radical Entertainment, the team behind The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Prototype follows much the same formula as that Marvel Comics inspired title. Both feature super-powered characters feared by the public and hunted by the military. Both take place in New York City, where their respective characters can travel from the streets to the rooftops, wrecking havoc as they see fit. The main difference between the two titles is that Prototype’s antagonist, Alex Mercer, is a completely original character, unfettered by preconceived notions of what he will and will not do to further his quest for the truth.

The question is, can this sort of game handle an original character, or is ultimate destruction best left in the hands of the more professional superhero?

Loved
Weaving Its Web: The real meat of Prototype’s story isn’t found in the game’s normal cut scenes, but in the minds of specially marked citizens wandering the streets of New York City. Grabbing these marked citizens and absorbing them into you causes a flashback that helps fill in the plot, as you learn what your victim knew about the sinister plot that made Alex the way he is. The flashbacks are a combination of solid voice work, stock photography, and bizarre live-action imagery, pieced together like a mental collage by a Web of Deceit that urges the player to scour the city, collecting memories like Pokémon. The adds a layer of intrigue to a story that otherwise would have been your average tale of scientific misconduct.

Freedom of Movement: The streets of New York City belong to Alex Mercer, and you can feel it in every movement he makes. Apparently a practitioner of the extreme sport of parkour, Mercer leaps over cars and pushes through crowds of pedestrians as he travels, or simply takes to the rooftops with his ability to run up sheer surfaces. As you upgrade your movement capabilities you’ll find yourself gliding long distances across the skies of the city, wind-whipping at your clothing. The controls might feel a little loose, but the feeling of freedom they afford more than compensates.

Drunk With Power: Though he begins his new life as a strong guy who can run up buildings, Prototype’s upgrade system soon presents Alex Mercer with an astounding array of powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. There are several core power sets to utilise, each with their own unique moves and uses, generally manifesting about Alex’s hands. The blade power turns your arm into a massive edged weapon, perfect for taking out some of the game’s more powerful enemies, while the tendril power allows you to attack from afar, proving particularly useful in the area of helicopter hijacking. As impressive as the normal powers are, the Critical Mass moves are even more so. I spent a good couple of hours in the “new game plus mode” once I finished my first play through, seeing how many pedestrians I could take out at once with the devastating tendril burst power. For the record, it was around 108.

I’ll Be You: Much more than an unstoppable juggernaut of raw power, Alex Mercer can also take on the appearance of any NPC in the game, allowing him to blend in with the population, losing any pursuit that might be following him at the time. This is a mechanic you’ll use quite often throughout the game, sometime merely to make an escape, and other times to infiltrate enemy strongholds. There’s nothing quite like having a whole fleet of helicopters on your tail, only to drop off the side of a building, turn into a civilian, and then lose yourself in the crowd. On top of blending in, certain NPCs can be absorbed to learn new skills, such as the ever-handy helicopter piloting proficiency, which leads us neatly to…

Tanks For The Firepower: Charging in with your powers blazing is certainly one way to handle a situation, but there’s just something about quietly hijacking a tank or a helicopter, wandering over to your objective inconspicuously, and then opening fire with everything you’ve got. The initial trailers made vehicle hijacking seem like a gimmick, but it works rather well in the game. Once you’ve upgraded the appropriate power, taking over helicopters, letting another chopper shoot you down and then leaping through the air to hijack the other is an amazingly cool feeling.

Play It Again, Alex: “New game plus” is always a plus! Once you’ve finished getting your arse kicked for a good 8-10 hours, you can play through the game again with all of the powers you’ve already unlocked. For extra added fun, do new game plus on easy mode, to help vent the frustration built up from a certain timed event you may have to do over and over again.

Hated
Throwaway Side Missions: Hmmm. A mutanagenic virus is rapidly infecting the city, I regains memories by absorbing other people into my being, and an elite military force is trying to kill me at every turn. I know! Let’s see how fast I can jump from rooftop to rooftop! While some of the side missions in Prototype do fit with the storyline, others just seem completely silly and out of place. Destroying a mutant hive? Yes. Seeing how close you can get to landing in a fountain after jumping from the top of a tall building? Not so much.

Difficulty Spikes: One minute you’re cruising around, kicking arse and taking identities; the next you’re reloading the last checkpoint for the fourth time, cursing at the television screen. This happens quite a lot in Prototype. Where other games are content to introduce new enemies slowly, letting you get a feel for them, Prototype gives you one, and then while you are catching your breath two more, and then five drop in. There were many situations where I found myself having to jump into a situation, take out a few enemies, and then run away, healing up and coming back for more. I did manage to finish the game, of course, but I had to continue far more than I feel I would have if the difficulty was more ramp than jagged mountain range.

The Other Side of the Story: As intriguing as the memory-siphoning story reveal is, the actual in-game cut scenes are rather bland and boring. The voice acting is so-so, with Alex’s sister in particular sounding as if she’s bored. It makes it hard to care about the characters in the game. Luckily the flashbacks are more than interesting enough to carry the story.

There’s no escaping it; this is an evolved version of Radical Entertainment’s Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. Many of the powers and mechanics are exactly the same as they were in the green goliath’s title. Movement in particular feels much like it did in Ultimate Destruction, with the smashing through cars replaced with hopping over them, unless you choose the Muscle Mass power set, in which case you’re one color-change away from being the green goliath himself. Even the Critical Mass feature from Hulk finds its way into Prototype, giving Alex access to ultra-powerful moves when his meter is either nearly depleted or filled past its saturation point. On top of that, one of the main bad guys bears a striking resemblance to General Thunderbolt Ross. Alex might not be able to level whole buildings, but when you can kill an entire city block worth of civilians with one massive attack, why bother?

It’s not a bad thing, really. Radical Entertainment did a spectacular job on the Hulk, and now we get a chance to see what they do when they aren’t tied down to a licensed character with an established history – and what they’ve done is pretty fantastic. Prototype puts an intoxicating amount of power in the player’s hands and doesn’t let up until the last enemy is torn asunder by your wriggling tentacles.

Prototype was developed by Radical Entertainment and published by Activision for the PlayStation 3, PC, and Xbox 360. Released on June 9 in North America and June 10 in Australia. Retails for $US59.99/AU$109.95 PS3 and 360, $US49.99/AU$89.95 PC. Played the Xbox 360 version. Completed game on normal difficulty.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

Thing is, The Sims 3 was released this month, and retains its #1 position ahead of the hoodie-clawing simulator. Something it’ll probably do for a few weeks to come, because when you see a PC game atop the charts in Britain, you know it’s selling well.

The Kübler-Ross model of grief proposed in the 1969 book Death and Dying is actually a theory about dealing with death and terminal disease, both of which are way worse than just calling it quits with your special someone.

But breakups – even the mature, amicable kind where you know even before you split that you’re going to be better off – still suck and sometimes you’ve got to let yourself go through the five stages in no particular order just to adjust.

1) Denial – Lord of the Rings: Conquest – “This can’t be happening to me.”
Here’s a game that’s very good at denying that anything is wrong. It’s got a blockbuster movie licence behind it, a dream team in development and publishing and the gameplay is based on the Star Wars: Battlefront series. Conquest had it all… so how could anything be wrong?

Even after reality set in for everybody else when the reviews came out, the the game kept right on denying with a big, fat downloadable content pack.

But no matter how many big-name characters are included from the book, sometimes you just have to face facts and move on.

2) Anger – Prototype – “It’s not fair!”
Life isn’t fair – particularly when it gives you body-morphing, people-absorbing powers that send the whole US Government after you as a terrorist. But there’s no time to be sad when they send in the helicopters and the tanks. Sometimes you just have to get mad and Prototype is the game to do it with.

Between flinging pedestrians into helicopters and elbow-dropping tanks, you’ll get rid of a lot of bad feelings and find healthy ways to entertain those revenge fantasies about your ex. Way better than boiling bunnies.

3) Bargaining – The Sims 3 – “Just one more, hour, minute, whatever… please, just one more!”
It’s natural to feel like you could make things right if you just had a little more time or could do something with the departing loved one just one more time. But the reality is, no matter how many “just one more” times you get, there’s always going to be more – more you want to do, more you want to say, more skills you need to raise before you can get that next job promotion.

In The Sims 3, you’ll never run out of “just one more” things to do – one more trip to the mausoleum, one more Try for Baby, one more hour toward earning lifetime achievement points so you can buy the steel bladder perk. Maybe, eventually, it’ll hit you that no matter what kind of deals you make inside your head, no matter how many ingredients you get for the Ambrosia recipe, sometimes it’s just time to stop.

4) Depression – Bionic Commando – “I can’t go on… it’s just too sad.”
It’s okay to be bummed when a long-term relationship ends. It’s even more okay if the relationship ended against your wishes.

*Spoilers* It’s especially okay to be bummed if the relationship ended against your wishes and your loved one winds up embedded in your arm. *End Spoilers*

Just sit back and ride out the angst with a good, long play through of a game that truly gets it when it comes to being sad.

5) Acceptance – Street Fighter IV – “You can’t fight it. Just take it.”
The final stage of grief is sometimes the longest one coming – maybe even 12 years in coming. But as this game demonstrates, when this stage of grief finally arrives, it has improved graphics, flashier combos and is generally a better experience than you thought to hope for. Sure, everything feels a bit different and maybe you miss the way things were. But Street Fighter has moved on – why shouldn’t you?

The bottom line is we all have different ways of coping with loss. Some are more effective than others, just like some games really are better than others. Whatever you choose to do to handle your feelings in the wake of a breakup, just make sure you’re taking care of yourself.

And make sure you’re playing on your own Xbox Live account because you cannot recover Gamerscore points earned on an account you shared with your ex.

Some PS3 owners are experiencing an error that tells them there is not enough space on their hard drive to install Prototype. Activision is working on a patch for the title that will fix the install issue, but in the meantime, the affected will have to engage their PS3 in a battle of wits. First, hide around the corner, jump out with a loud “boo!”, and slip the disc into your PlayStation. That’s not part of the official instructions mind you. I just thought I would help make it fun. The real solution lies in changing the amount of data on your hard disk by 700 megs. This means either removing that much, or adding that much. Activision suggests several different ways of doing this.

If your PS3 tells you that you have insufficient hard drive space to install, even if you do, you are going to need to change the available space on your hard drive by 700 MB. This can be done in a number of ways including the following:

- Installing or uninstalling another PS3 game that allows hard drive installation.
- Downloading game demos.
- Removing downloadable content.
- Adding / removing MP3’s or movies from the hard drive.
- Etc.

Or, you could simply wait until the fix is available and leave your data alone, but odds are you’ve got some huge install or demo you can do without just lurking there in the shadows of your hard disk, waiting to enable the game.

PS3 Prototype Installation Issue [Activision Support - Thanks Jolan!]